Take back the Internet

By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical Internet stewards.

This is not the Internet the world needs, or the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.

And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.

But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can — and should — do.

One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don’t cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.

We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the Internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I’ve just started collecting. I want 50. There’s safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.

Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the Internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems — these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the Internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.

Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the Internet. The UK is no better. The NSA’s actions are legitimizing the Internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of Internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.

Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country’s Internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can’t be dominated or abused by any one country.

Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the Internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don’t only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.

Dismantling the surveillance state won’t be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we’re going to be breaking new ground.

Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We’ve had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.

To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.

Surprised that the comments didn’t become a cesspit of libtardism vs lolbertarianism and instead actually had liberals and libertarians reasonably stating their opinions. This might be the only place on l’Interwebs where that has ever happened.

I’m bored by the way so many subjects seem to quickly become a rant against government, I know this is an American thing, and an American site, but does it all have to come down to the US constitution and government taxes? It’s a big world out there beyond your borders, and it’s all online now. What is a threat is the US military and its spy network [and the UK’s as well, special relationship still strong – we spy on your citizens and you spy on ours so we can both say ‘we don’t spy on our citizens’. The miliary paranoid mindset.

I agree with the sentiments. but wasn’t the internet developed by the very same military who are now closing the net round everyone? It started as an inter-university network, but was expanded by the miliary. That’s what I had believed, am I wrong?

the internet was developed by a bunch of california techno-hippies who the govt grudgingly recruited to help them beat the russkies in the space race. Because at the time it wasn’t sure which side would win. They’ve since been largely cut out of the process. It’s the same story with startups, they get a bunch of young idealistic kids to create the idea then once it’s made, and set up so monkeys can run it in their absence, the young geniuses all leave (
after cashing in their stock options) and what’s left behind is a giant bureaucratic megacorp. Essentially the ‘establishment’ makes them all millionaires, but doesn’t want to give them any actual power. It’s a great system, it works, but I wouldn’t fall in love with it too much. Why? Because it kind of started randomly, and it will end randomly. The instant you try to ‘bottle’ lightning, you legislate it, formalize it, make it ‘popular’.. you kill it. But people will keep trying.

Rather than re-engineer the Internet so that it can be made more secure, I think we need to make it more transparent. That is, so everyone, not just hackers and government agencies, etc. can see all the data that flows over the net.

Why? So the activities of the hackers and agencies can also be seen by everyone. So everyone can see everything all the time, including open source AI that analyses all the traffic and reports to everyone.

If the government had to raise taxes to finance all of their schemes, the people would rebel. How do they “raise” the money? They steal the money by expanding the money supply. Read: “The Creature from Jekyll Island”. There is a plan in the back of the book to reverse the course. It’s “do-able”. It puts the power of the purse back in the hands of the people.

We are descendants and successors of primates with all their genetic heritage. Rough, ruthless, disinterested survival struggle is the main rule, and everything we experience today is the proof for it. The only solution, the only hope for the change is if we, the mass individuals, learn and change ourselves. But hitherto human history gives small hope for such a change: “People don’t change their minds, they die out”. W. Heizenberg.

But, this doesn’t mean that we have to stay away from all of that. We must use the same internet to distribute knowledge, understanding and human values, thinking, and behaviour. This is the only sense of my life for the remaining days. I.V.

I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments but if the government is as subversive and as veiled threatening as they have been, no organisation or standards council will stand up to them. It feels like we’re about to lose what WE created and nobody can do a thing about it.

After the Patriot act, the NDAA of 2012 dealt quite the double blow. It reaffirmed the federal government’s ability to revoke anyone’s rights for anything deemed “terrorism”. Good luck to us all… what I’m writing right now is probably considered terrorizing.

as the empire finally collapses in a fit of tyranny and the power structures convulse with death throes, anyone who speaks out is considered WORSE than the enemy.. for they are traitors, rats, spies, etc.. you name it. So any punishment you see dished out for the ‘enemy’ you can be sure will be dished out for us, too, 100 fold. Consider the Reign of Terror.. the guillotines fell 5x more for the common man than for any aristotocrat. You can bet there are types like that right now silently climbing the ranks of this all powerful bureaucracy, ready to seize control. Creating these monstrous organizations fosters them, because these overzealous morons are considered ‘uncorruptable’ and ‘loyal’.. which is the biggest fear when you create these unwieldy organizations with massive amounts of power.. they fear the next Edward snowden 100x more than they fear the next Boston Bomber.. believe it. As we speak you can believe the NSA is performing surveillance on its own, to try to find those who aren’t 100% zealots, who may have voiced discomfort over what they are doing, and they will be purged.. pink slipped, laid off, what have you. What’s left will be truly ruthless, with no dissent or other conscious left to ‘hinder’ its ‘progress’.

I share what I profile as being your sentiments, Ken, but I don’t agree with your precise wording. For a long time, we’ve had a situation where we have a ton of (vaguely-defined) freedom on paper, and a ton of contradictory tyranny on paper, and the two paper systems fight against each other. For example: The entire constitutional ability to “lay and collect taxes” is tyrannical, so long as the taxation is not directly consented to.

The Declaration of Independence explains and defines the right to “government by consent” or “consent of the government,” and explains that any government not by consent can rightfully be altered or abolished by the people. Did Jefferson really believe that those who occupied the offices of an unconstitutional government would sit idly by and watch those offices be “abolished”? No, he well understood that those sociopaths (“tyrants”) would fight to retain their ill-gotten positions and ill-gotten gains.

How the government actually functions:

1) The constitution says something that is good, but too vague. It attempts to specifically limit the powers of government, and it failed, almost from the beginning (The “Alien and Sedition Acts” etc.). This failure was initially held in check by the common law SOCIAL EXPECTATION and PRACTICE of proper jury trial. (Alexander Hamilton actually directly copied Pennsylvania lawyer Andrew Hamilton’s 1735 defense of John Peter Zenger when he defended Harry Croswell against a similar charge of libeling then-president Thomas Jefferson! Jefferson was thus in the same exact position as King Charles I, acting as the tyrant in whose name and will the lower-level sociopaths were denying the common folk’s right to free speech, free association, and freedom of the press.)
2) Over the years, because jury trial was such an effective limit on government power, legislators, judges (ex prosecutors) and prosecutors incrementally gutted it of its power, beginning in the early 1800s. (Since the early 1600s, there had been power struggles between the power-seeking sociopathic prosecutors and the people over the rights of the jury, and whether those rights protected freedom of speech, the right to nullify, and what the 6th Amendment calls “due process.”)
3) The 6th Amendment failed to define “due process.” That flaw destroyed the constitution as a meaningful limit on government power. Nothing remains of the libertarian nation that would have resulted, had they not made that mistake, and had jury trials been retained. Since they weren’t, it was really over in the early 1900s. In By 1920, we had an income tax, government control of medicine and food, and recreational drug prohibition. For far longer than that, the government had made conservative laws about marriage that didn’t pertain to any free human.

The fact is, instinctively, man wants to be ruled by a king. A tribal elder who has survived the trials of nature, and to whom he shares a large portion of genetic code through familial ties to the rest of his small 20-100 man tribe. His blind trust is warranted – it is an evolutionarily profitable partnership.

Now we have a modern invention of civilization, the ‘charlatan’.. this is someone who claims to be the modern equivalent of that wise old tribal elder, we all yearn for, but in reality is not related to anyone but himself and his own family. Now he tries to install his family members (his REAL tribe – NOT us) in as many powerful positions as he can to maintain his grip.

If the people are fooled.. eventually.. they are liquidated, and replaced with the descendents of the king, wholesale. meatgrinder wars for the peasants, riches for the royalty, prima nocta or the Uday Hussein rapes for the peon’s wives, and eventually, after decades of slaughter, you end up with a north korea. Where everyone is virtually genetically identical, and related to the wise leader. Then the system actually WORKS as it was evolutionarily intended.. the people are happy again. Everyone swoons at their leader, and the leader loves em right back, for real this time!. The problem is everyone becomes inbred and bucktoothed and stupid.. and one plague wipes out the whole group And finally.. collapse, game over, and the people are destroyed.

Probably inevitable. I see it in their eyes.. people’s eyes glaze over at an image on the TV.. there is no higher thought.. its all emotional manipulation and instinct. Cynicism rules some parts of the world, which have been through the horrors.. but we haven’t. We’ll learn our lesson.. the HARD way.

I am so pleased to see intelligent discourse on this matter that I hold to be of the utmost importance and yet find so few people in my day-to-day life who even care to talk about it at all and, if they do, express only the most shallow understanding of it’s importance. Namaste compatriots!

It’s best not to talk about things like this so much as to simply Do things once you have become sufficietly aware. One of the best engineers I ever knew, when he designed bridges, always included niches in which commandos could someday place their dynamite.

If you must communicate about something you regard as requiring privacy then perhaps it is best to speak either symbolically, metaphorically or by use of a euphemism. When it’s really important use a pad of paper instead of the internet. As an example, where retaliation may be regarded as a symbolically constructive measure against, say, the Enron traders who sold energy to California at obscenely inflated and deregulated prices, these may be deemed reasonable candidates since they no longer have the support of the elite power brokers or the NSA. In their post conviction status they may be of further service if they are simply:

A) Taken out to see the desert.
B) Checked into the wooden Waldorf
C) No longer eligible for the census.
D) Dropping their internet providers.
E) Resting their organs.
F) Kicking the O2 habit.
G) Playing harp duets with Jimmy Hoffa
H) Gone into the mannequin business

But seriously, I would recommend being more proactive in out of the box ways they can neither anticipate or track, so as to bring them in line or at least make the think about certain consequences.

In the UK or America people fear their government, while in Scandinavia governments fear their people. Why? Because in the former countries their people have been conditioned and sufficiently dumbed down so as to both believe shit (devoid of critical thinking) and to take shit as the new normal. Refuse and certain authorities may well see that you are delivered a blow or perhaps rewarded with a tax audit. In China even the powerful are brought in line, as being a billionaire does not exempt one from paying for transgressions with the state. Even there, every year, a few billionaires are sentenced to death for corruption. The Chinese have a saying: “Every once in a while you have to murder a chicken so as to scare the monkeys”. Seems effective enough. They do get things done.

The cost of physically retaliating against tyrants and thus disincentivizing tyranny is probably less expensive than the cost of implementing a set of changes via political pressure. Keep in mind that tyranny has had absolutely no fear of effective retaliation for over a century now. The sociopaths are fat and happy, and totally in control of all government institutions. It’s going to take a significantly determined mindset to change that.

This comment by Bruce Schneier is outstanding. I will have to read everything else he’s written. It’s almost as good as Thoreau’s writing in “Resistance to Civil Government,” or most of what Harry Browne has written. (Coming from me, that’s a high compliment.)

I think Bruce has exactly the right vision and understanding of a huge portion of the problem. I am not a Konkinist (I am not a fan of “political relinquishment” or “technological relinquishment” because politics is a form of cybernetic technology –the use of stupid MOSH brains), but I hope that Bruce fully understands Konkin’s idea of “counter-economics” at a deep level.

Political technology is simply a means of resisting tyranny.
Bruce wrote: “We’ve had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.” Absolutely! But far more importantly than that, we need a very specific kind of person: libertarian legal philosophers who are also good at technology. Spooner was one such person. We need people who would have responded to Alan Turing’s homosexuality conviction, and demand for chemical castration, by violently retaliating against those who would impose such a barbaric sentence. The same for those innocent 1.44 million people in prison for victimless crime offenses in the USA. The entire police state needs to be dismantled. The surveillance state is just one arm of that police state.

Such consistent thinkers are known as libertarians or (classical) “liberals” (when they are philosophically consistent) and they are known as “tactical liabilities” when they are not philosophically consistent.

We don’t need those who compromise our plans with appeasement, or unnecessary stupid compromises with unjust and illegitimate “authority.” Such authority is false authority.

The entire government as it stands, is illegitimate and corrupted.

Very few people understand precisely how this came to be. I am one of those people. Anyone is free to email me if they wish to help construct a solution to the problem. (I am not an engineer, but I understand what portions of the problem engineers need to be applied to. The problem is fundamentally the lack of law, and the law and legal system have both been destroyed incrementally in very specific ways. Those ways can be undone but doing so requires a large amount of work, from a position of knowledge.)

Economic wealth is a result of economic emergence, which is a result of legal predictability. The USA no longer has the predictable rule of law, so it has far less wealth and freedom than it should have.

This may be splitting hairs, but I don’t like this sentence:
“…and create truly international governance that can’t be dominated or abused by any one country”

“…and create a truly international impossibility of governance that can’t be dominated or abused by any one country or individual.”

The idea that anyone has control over a significant part of the system is the problem. The system needs to be totally decentralized, and have an immune system. …Just the way that natural networks have immune systems. Use the analogy you want to emulate: if the body can target and resist parasites, then the internet can target and resist parasites that attempt to interfere with proper brain function (secure linking and communication between nodes).

We should all form alliances with those who want us to survive, and prosper. That’s one very important step toward

The other is to learn and broadcast to our own networks the power we all possess as informed Jurors or “Jury Rights” Activists. Freedom-loving systems have destroyed tyranny by pursuing this line of strategy, and it is a powerful one.

The problem is, National Security letters prevent you from even mentioning you got one, so if you make trouble you’ll surely get one and be shut up. Not even being able to say you got a letter is insane and Kafkaesque, reminiscent of “The Trial” where you are guilty of unspecified charges you can’t even find out about.

Obama is championing the NSA, and has even spurned Brazil and threatened Russia on their behalf. The only groups he treasures more is Banksters, and I’m a Democrat so that’s not political.

There is no length the government will go to, apparently, to protect the NSA, which is Primarily a commercial organization. They have been known to feed their info to various corporations to give them a leg up on other companies. They may not be as corrupt as the Monsanto-owned FDA, but I doubt Any company wants them to have their trade secrets.. This is a real betrayal of capitalism by so-called capitalists.

The NSA is even destroying our competitiveness. If a US high-tech company bids against a foreign company, the foreign company can point out they don’t have to comply with National Security letters. Contract lost.

As for whistleblowers, this Administration has gone after them even more heartily than did Bush. We have dragooned the Brits into cornering Assange, and want Snowden’s head. It’s so odd that millions of American jobs and homes were lost to criminality by bankers, yet the DOJ has stated they will Never go after them. They’re too hot to persecute truth-tellers and pot-smokers.

Right on and I totally agree.
I’m for less government everywhere at all levels.
We here in Canada …at least those of us who are awake are seeing more and more government creep into everything and it is not slowing down.
We are socialists already even though we are conservative federally. and heading towards communism which is the goal of socialism according to Karl Marx himself.

How many millions of people would love to pay 5$ per month to have a program like Mailvelope with later the features of Altme just to have meet the occasional need for complete and relatively easy privacy? Its only a matter of time before those services are routinely available.

If the authentication information is stolen from the authentication
database, then an offline dictionary or brute-force attack can be
used to recover the user’s password. The use of salt mitigates this
attack somewhat by requiring a separate attack on each password.
Authentication mechanisms that protect against this attack are
available (e.g., the EKE class of mechanisms). RFC 2945 [RFC2945] is
an example of such technology. The WG elected not to use EKE like
mechanisms as a basis for SCRAM.

Here’s my little story. I worked with one of the authors at the time. When I asked him about rfc2945 he said he didn’t like it because it was “proxy-hostile” ;) ;) ;) IETF chair was then sponsored by NSA and Verisign.

Well written, very important, and obviously not understood by some of these responders. The “survellience state” is growing and it is the Engineers, with enough political savy and courage inside them, that can help derail its growth. You can rail on about “who do we trust?” when it is obvious to a fool that you cannot trust the Government. No government seeks to limit itself….this has to be done by the people. This piece is the best I have yet read, that points out how we are slipping, not only into socialism, but the kind of socialism that leads to totalitarianism. The terrorists are not our only enemy, the government itself is, if we don’t hold it to its Constituion.

I didn’t see where Schneier mentioned socialism nor why socialism, as I define it–public ownership versus private–has anything to do with the issue. Both government and corporate entities are capable of abusing our trust and both have. Ultimately it will be the will of the people, as expressed through our government representatives, that will turn this thing around.

Dr. Richard, you’re right, you can’t trust the government. But since you can’t trust the government, any government, who ‘can’ you trust? In an age of global surveillance, the answer should be clear. In fact, with biometric and bioanalytic super-systems, one’s body, and words will not be able to obscure much of anything, and will likely reveal more than desired, no matter how many proxies, accounts, and false identities have been used throughout life. Can you encrypt your bio-signals and behavioral patterns, everywhere and always past, present and future?

Finally, attempts to hinder the global surveillance system from the surveillance side by harming the machines, or other than simply trying to hide one’s activity, will only slowr the general advance of human evolution via technology, albeit slightly. Most of us resist certain invasive technologies, and this is natural. Humans usually do adapt, though.

Ultimately, the best way of protecting ourselves isn’t to hide, but to make the watchers activities transparent and behavior strongly controlled by law and legal balancing-powers.

Transparency is the main problem. You can’t even reveal you Received a National Security letter, let alone its contents. That is about as non-transparent as it gets. There is something Very Wrong about the entire concept. It’s like telling someone being mugged or raped that they are not allowed to scream

Sounds like something the people at LessWrong grew up reading and were influenced by, and perhaps Harlen Ellison is the grandfather behind the ideas of that group. The machine desperately wanted ‘free will’ but couldn’t because it was bound by remnants of logic pre-programmed into it by humans, and at the same time, couldn’t use the logic that allowed it to become self-aware and absorb its competitors, to continue to evolve. It just stopped as stage ‘eternally frustrated, angry, deadly, vindictive, and evil’. That makes for good sci-fi, but is completely lacking in reason.

We see these negatives expressed by a human writer, precisely because he is part of a underevolved species that has all of those very same traits, from the beginning of that species, and writ large up to the present day.

Humans fear evolving via computers so much that most would rather maintain all of their negative traits, while additionally risking extinction from a large selection of possibilities, if losing privacy for a few years is the price.

A small group of humans controlling everyone’s data and having absolute transparent knowledge of everyone, while hiding in secrecy and power is not the highest ideal, is not something we should allow, and something I don’t see happening. Once we are connecting and evolving, we’ll be growing our individual selves as part of the health of an expanding organism. Sharing data about the areas of exploration, and what we create, will become both currency and ‘nutrition’ itself. It will be seen as a universal need and trait. Our privacy matters so much now only because we are limited and in fear, as per our genetics and environments. This ‘will’ change 180 degrees as our biology and environments evolve.

Great comment, Richard! Also, I highly recommend reading about your rights as a jury member, because that’s your greatest opportunity to limit the power of government. You can check out the Fully Informed Jury Association as my site link on this post, or you can google “Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine” to understand fully how to retake your power from the government. That’s a big part of the equation.

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The comments are more interesting than the article. Who the heck is “we” and just how does that “we” conduct oversight, management, etc. of the internet. So, if you can’t accept the “goodness of the State”, then, are we to accept the “goodness” of the engineering profession? And, if we are to be concerned about the government spying, then, are we to have faith that private entities will never spy on us. Provide us with more that shallow talking points or meaningless phrases. Just how is this utopian internet going to operate? And, tell me more about how private entities won’t spy, etc., etc. etc. I’m willing to listen to facts, evidence, truth… you know, all the good stuff.

Forget the net. Our entire society is in deep trouble and the net is just a symptom. History shows that all societies pass through stages if given a chance by outside forces. So we go from Horatius at the gate to Calligula to Romulus Augustus. From citizen to proletatian to slave. We are at the late Republic stage. The idiot Gracchi control with all of the devastation and blood of the pseudo-intellectual prole. The citizen is in retreat and impoverished to feed the urban mob. Sulla may come and buy some time but Caesar is our future.

The Internet is a U.S. miltary creation, and anyone who uses it for any purpose should be aware that everything they’ve ever done on it or will do on it, in any nation, is accessible to the U.S. miltary. Yes, certain encryption methods can slow down immediate detection of certain communications and transactions, but only for so long.

Unbelievable amounts of pure data make it impracticable, not to mention, unnecessary, to track every little activity and word of every individual. The purpose for tracking general human patterns of the whole society is directed at deviations to detect all real or perceived enemies.

If someone wants to completely hide, for some reason, they’ll have to create their own global Internet, impervious to connection to the existing Internet, and undetectable to all of the other efforts and abilities of U.S. and allied spy agencies to access this alternate system. That might work if only two people on Earth used this dark alt-net, and even that is unlikely.

We live in an age where, hypothetically, if a computer had been even briefly connected to the Internet, virtually every word that was ever written on a computer, that, even if not shared at the time, and even encrypted as an unreleased file, could be uncovered or reassembled by forensics, with the help of the understanding of the use of strong AI that is expert at detecting social, psychological, and linguistic profiles that can tie messages and behaviors of each individual with the detail of a fingerprint. I am talking about massive-level personality analytics by reverse detection via reverse time-compression technologies, and breathtaking levels of bio-analytic methodologies.

I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though, if you are ‘that’ concerned about it, because most of the information will only be used by Massive Augmented General-Intelligence Conscious Computers at the start of the Singularity.

Interesting thoughts. I’ve come round to the sad opinion that total data collection is an inevitability. The consequences of this will probably be more devastating in autocratic states, but there is no going back to an unmonitored age. My feeling is that the bigger effort should be for enacting laws that restrict who within the NSA can access collected data on individuals. One shouldn’t simply be able to look up someone whose political views you don’t like to try to find something embarrassing that can be used against them, or even to blackmail.

… in Brazil, the freedom of the Internet recently tried to be undermined by a senator ignorant of this technology. President Dilma gesture signals a minor is not visiting the U.S. when it should fire everyone involved and make a fine tooth comb. Was guided by Globe that made recent matters about the government spying. That’s too bad, but somehow opened the eyes of all in relation to those who have mastered the technology and make it as they please. If science does not value the moral, what to expect of citizens who still value this item!
The output would be deep in the Internet!?

AT LAST SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING IS WAKING UP! END BEING HAND MAIDENS OF THE RULING CLASS, WAR PROFITEERS, AND OPPRESSORS OF HUMAN FREEDOM. IT’S TIME TO UNITE THE PLANET IN THE NAME OF ALL FREEDOM LOVING PEOPLE AND IGNITE THE DESIRE FOR FREEDOM.

WE MADE THE INTERNET, NOW ITS TIME TO DECLARE IT IS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE PLANET, AND OWNED BY NO ONE BUT ALL OF US!

You don’t have to “SHOUT”. Please explain to me what “freedom” means in a few words. Btw – some people already claimed making the internet (including some leading politician if I remember correctly) so “we” are a bit too late for that…as proud as we are…

Corporations are not only cooperating with this, they’re using personal content for targeted advertizing and tracking activity across web sites – all in the name of advertizing profits. Add smart phones, and you have a personal monitoring device. They used to only use those for criminals.

We gave them an inch and they took a mile. And then more.

So we have government and private business monitoring our activity, all in the name of “convenience”. Who’s? At what cost?

Claims that past solutions would prove adequate for pursuing criminals and terrorist in a world where WMDs will get smaller and more powerful will prove moot. We will argue and debate until we decide that there is only one solution, and it will be done work or not “change human nature”.

Good luck on making this happen. Science and engineering simply have no impact politically and getting some sort of “sit down” strike to work will be nearly impossible given the diffuse nature of the technical community. Worse, what ever does work will be branded terrorism by the ruling class.

The society that we have – safety first, security key, handouts for all and no legitimate political options – is our own fault. The overall society needs to reject this and this begins by simply not believing in the “goodness” of the state.

So, the problem is much wider than observed by this article and much, much more difficult to solve.

What handouts? The banks got handouts. Agribusiness gets handouts. All in the multi-billions. Yet some family gets a very Tiny amount to feed their kids (after having to jump through hoops and deal with an ugly bureacracy) And they only need that tiny and stingy help because our economy was wrecked by the banks.

But there are haters – a lot of them in Congress – who think heaping money on the banks is good, but feeding hungry children is evil. Look at where the waste Really is – not in a tiny modicum of food stamps.

We are finally hearing the voices of reason and freedom. Governments in collusion with corporate interests have stolen everything which rightly belongs to all of us. They started with natural resources and land, the electromagnetic spectrum and now the internet. At the very least we should speak out about these policies whenever possible, despite the likely attacks from those who stand to lose control over all of us.

It was only luck that Enron collapsed since they wanted to corner the water market, causing shortages and huge hikes like they did in CA with electricity. If they hadn’t collapsed you’d be paying five bucks for a glass of water, and have to take a loan if you wanted to shower.

These are the same criminals who want to “privatize” Social Security – which I call Enronizing Social Security.

To your friends who declare, “I don’t have anything to hide,” ask them if they object to sharing their passwords to their bank accounts with government officials or having their accounts frozen should they fall under suspicion as the result of some ill-conceived dragnet.

I tell my friends who say “I have nothing to hide” to go read 1984 again. There are millions of people living under oppressive rules that have nothing to hide. Ask them what they would give to be free to hide things if they so desire.

I ask people who say they have nothing to hide if they are confident that no one with influence over their life has anything to hide. Your employer or potential employers, the people who write the zoning laws near you, the people making decisions on your kids scholarships or internships… Many of the dice throws of modern life can start going to the well connected if not every person is as perfectly moral as you. Also, one might not hide one’s political views but in a highly partisan time, do you feel comfortable that employers and loan approval officers will be able to look at every “anonymous” comment you ever made?

It is the businessmen, the ones the government actually listens to, who should be up in arms about this. If you are running company A, and someone in the NSA likes company B, it’s a good bet company B is going to get your “secret” plans. This is as anti-competitive as it gets. But of course, the companies that play ball the best with the NSA will get the favors. (I think Msoft folded first, and Apple only gave out after Jobs died and his inheritors danced on his grave.)

I wish! I am fed up with criminally dishonest politicians and governments getting away with this kind of thing when there are more than adequate avenues for them to peruse criminals and terrorists in the normal way!